The Good Life
Would there be rats? This was what worried me. What if
there were rats?
Michele said there wouldn’t be any, so don’t worry. But how could she be sure? Well, she said, she hadn’t seen any rats, quod erat demonstrandum, there were no rats. I can’t fault her eyesight, but did this actually prove anything?
As I headed out to our two compost bins with a garden fork, all I could think about was “rats, rats, rats”. This was all Michele’s fault to begin with. After concluding that our two big compost bins were in need of turning, she said she wouldn’t be doing it because – and I quote – “I’m compost phobic”. Then she told me a story.
Many years ago, when the world was younger and so was she, Michele would, to earn a bit of pocket money, spend an afternoon a week helping her favourite grandmother, Rona, with her garden.
Rona, as I understand it, had the greenest of green fingers, and the Ponsonby townhouse she shared with her husband, Les, Michele’s grandfather, had a fabulously verdant city garden. It is from Rona that Michele inherited her love of cooking and her need to have her hands in soil.
Anyway, one fine day, Michele was helping Rona tend to something, let’s say the herb garden. Rona asked Michele if she might get some compost from the compost bin to help the herb garden on its way.
This appeared a harmless chore. But when Michele lifted the lid off the bin, what should jump out? An enormous rat! But that was barely the half of it. The enormous rat had fled leaving a nest of baby rats! Michele, who is not a shrieker, shrieked. Michele, who is not a runner, ran.
It was left to Rona, who was of the generation that had seen off depression, war and Rob Muldoon, to sort out the situation. Using a garden spade, she dispatched each of the baby rats in turn, leaving Michele, so she assures me, with a terrible affliction that, all these years later, meant there was absolutely no way she would be giving the compost a stir. So it would have to be me who would face the rats – not that she had seen any.
Michele, who is not a shrieker, shrieked. Michele, who is not a runner, ran.
There is no instruction manual for the good life. But there is a bible: The Good Life, the 70s TV sitcom. And the good life, according to The Good Life, is all about self-sufficiency.
It has occurred to me, after recently rewatching the first season for a bit of inspiration, that for two people with nearly 5ha to their names, we aren’t nearly as self-sufficient as we ought to be, and not even remotely as self-sufficient as The Good Life’s Tom and Barbara Good. They grew their own vegetables, milked their own goat, kept pigs, made cheese, wove cloth, used animal poo to generate electricity and concocted their own wine – their famously strong “peapod burgundy”. They even cultivated laughs.
All we manage is a few vegetables and fruit over summer, including some excellent strawberries, although we have had some success growing a small patch of jokes to sell to the Listener. I’m sure if Tom and Barbara were to mark these efforts, they would give us just a D+ for “could try very much harder”, and we could hardly argue.
Compost, I decided, would be a great place to start being more self-sufficient because, when you have a garden, all good things begin with quality compost.
Our wooden-sided bins, which were here when we arrived, had hardly been touched for a year and hadn’t been turned for much longer. Michele thought that if their contents were to become proper compost, a good stir was needed. Then she did her own stirring with her story about the baby rats and her phobia.
As I approached the bins, I won’t say I was afraid, but I was prepared for a fright. Leaping in, I began turning the first, then the second bin. It took a bit of grunt, but it didn’t require much courage. It seems it isn’t just us who have been ignoring our compost bins all this time, the rats had given up on them, too. l